Articles, stories, and other textual content are increasingly disseminated over the Internet. Such electronic content is typically displayed in a “page layout” or “portrait” orientation. That is, text is often displayed on a screen in a layout consistent with the general shape of a traditional sheet of paper (e.g., 8.5″×11″), or book or magazine page. When such electronic content is displayed on a computer monitor, it is typically allowed to extend downward in an indefinitely long page, and viewers are provided with scroll bars, arrows, scroll wheels, or any other well-known user elements for advancing down a page, by showing the page as moving upward. Even if an article of electronic content has an unknown length, traditional browsers are equipped with mechanisms for adjusting scroll bars, etc. to accommodate any length of electronic content.
Some web browsers are also equipped for handling changing amounts and lengths of electronic content. For example, online publishers are increasingly making use of really simple syndication (“RSS”) feeds, which are a web feed format for dynamically publishing HTML content. Browsers equipped with RSS readers or extensions may automatically receive and adjust a displayed amount of HTML content based on the content that an RSS feed is subscribed to, and a frequency of publication.
Recently, however, electronic content is increasingly disseminated over mobile devices. For example, people are increasingly using smartphones, tablets, and other handheld or wearable devices to view web content, including articles, stories, and even RSS feeds. However, many of these smartphones and other mobile devices make use of user interfaces not found on traditional desktop and laptop computers. For example, many smartphones and other mobile devices include touchscreens that can be touched, swiped, dragged, and so on, to manipulate images and user elements displayed on their screens. One common interface allows a user to swipe displayed content upward to intuitively “scroll down” a displayed page. However, when a user rotates such a device from a portrait or page view, to a landscape orientation, many users find it more natural to “swipe” displayed content side-to-side to simulate turning pages in a book, as opposed to scrolling down a portrait-oriented screen.
Displaying textual content in pages that can be swiped from left to right is more challenging than displaying textual content in a continuous page that can be scrolled up and down, because the content is discretized into pages. Existing implementations of such a user interface pattern involve breaking HTML content into discreet chunks, which is even more challenging in applications where content is not fully known, such as an RSS feed or dynamic article. Adding to the challenge of displaying unknown length content in discreet, swipeable pages is the fact that user devices all have different sizes, aspect ratios, margins, and so on.
Accordingly, a need exists for systems and methods for manipulating electronic content. More generally, a need exists for systems and methods for horizontally paginating HTML content, such as by dividing an arbitrary amount of HTML content into separate “pages”, regardless of a device's screen size or orientation.